Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning by Owen Barfield

Author:Owen Barfield [Barfield, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Religion, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing
ISBN: 9780819560261
Publisher: Barfield Press UK
Published: 1928-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Page 116

For this 'contact' with other words is the precise point at which the potential new meaning originally enters language. And it is by quotations illustrating such 'contacts' that I am trying to trace the gradual loss of ancient meaning, given or created, from the word 'ruin', the recovery of part of it, and the positive gain which, thanks to individual poets, arises out of that sequence of loss and recovery.

In Latin, then, the four letters 'r-u-i-n' never lost the power to suggest movement. In certain contexts they may seem to modern readers to possess a purely static and material reference; but if so, it is because those readers are of the kind described by Maupassant as demanding only a 'sens', a definable meaning. The soul of such a word as 'ruina' is really inseparable from motion.

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